Album Review: Eilen Jewell, ‘Sundown Over Ghost Town’

by Kelly McCartney (@theKELword) for FolkAlley.com

With a title like ‘Sundown over Ghost Town’ and cover art of a silhouetted figure with an acoustic guitar in front of a vast, star-filled horizon, Eilen Jewell’s new album sends a signal that what lies therein could easily be simple and spacious country-folk songs. Uh, not quite. Yes, there are some simple and spacious country-folk songs here — “Half-Broke Horse,” “Green Hills,” and “Songbird,” at the very least. Otherwise, Jewell takes the theme of coming home and has fun with it. After all, you can come home again, but it may or may not be what you remember.

In Jewell’s case, the story unfolds from the point of her return to Idaho after living in Boston. Oh, and having a baby, too. Most of the lyrical content draws from those endlessly deep wells. On the whole, the set is more refined and more restrained than Jewell records past, but no less creative, in its own way. From the gentle, mandolin-filled folk of “Worried Mind” to the delightful, Tex-Mex rockabilly of “Rio Grande” to the high lonesome torch balladry of “Here with Me,” the album alternately lopes and lilts in all the right places.

For instance, Jewell isn’t the first artist this year to set surf rock against a spaghetti western backdrop as she does on the spirited “Hallelujah Band” — Lord Huron, too, makes that mix on ‘Strange Trails’ — but it works well and shows just how many different colors Jewell has on her artist’s palette.

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‘Sundown Over Ghost Town’ is out now on Signature Sounds, and is available at iTunes and Amazon.com.